WWW

This is a map of the connections among the population of people who recently tweeted the term “WWW2010”. The size of the profile photos indicates the log scaled number of followers that person has. The edges vary in weight, thicker edges mean more of the three types of connections we track, follows, replies, and mentions, appear between any two people.

This is April 29th:

This is April 28th:

A row of isolated people stand at the bottom of the graph, mentioning “www2010” but lacking any visible connection to anyone else who tweets the same term.

The giant component is dominated by the corporate twitter accounts for information technology companies and prominent researchers in the field.

One way to rank people in a network is in terms of how “between” they are — how much they occupy a position that is like a bridge between otherwise disconnected people or groups. There is a correlation between the number of connections and your betweenness centrality, but it is possible to be very between and have just a few (at least two!) connections.

In this layout the x axis is the log of the number of followers and the y axis is the log of the number of tweets. Some people out perform the relationship between tweets and followers, attracting more followers for fewer tweets than others. Above the diagonal, some people lag in terms of their tweet to follower ratio.